Issue Fully autonomous laboratories draw capital but remain outside mainstream practice

Summary

Fully autonomous laboratories are attracting capital but have not become standard practice in pharmaceutical research. CB Insights observes that startups are promising closed-loop experimentation, in which AI designs experiments, machines run them and results feed straight back into the next round. Adoption of these systems, however, remains limited. The commercial maturity of the companies offering them is also still early on the firm's scales. This stands in contrast to more modest AI tools, such as research assistants and experiment planning platforms, which are already spreading. The self-driving lab therefore remains a funded ambition rather than the everyday way drugs are discovered.